Photographers: April 2006 Archives
New York photographer Harry Wilks will be featured on this evening's "Jane's New York", on channel 4 at 7pm. Wilkes is known for his panoramic rooftop architectural photography of the NY skyline and his efforts to get acces to oft-inaccessible places provides him with a viewpoint most of us simply cannot have aside from through the viewfinder of his camera.
40 Wall Street, 1992 by Harry Wilks
The Richard Misrach retrospective, Chronologies, closes this weekend at Pace/MacGill. If you're in San Fran, you've got another week to catch the sibling show at Fraenkel Gallery.
Misrach is one of my favorite landscape photographers and I was first exposed to his work at the "Battleground Point" show at Robert Mann a few years ago. (An example from that show is below.) This retrospective contains examples from that project, a study of Nevada's Humboldt Sink. I have personal affection for these images as I spent a good deal of time growing up at my grandparents' in north central Nevada.
Misrach established his reputation with a series of desert projects ("The Desert Cantos") notably "Bravo 20", but moved on to other quite dissimilar approaches to the landscape. His meditations on the sky San Franscico Bay are the most commercial of these. His most recent work, "On The Beach", takes full advantage of the en vogue large format photography to engulf the viewer in an endless landscape of ocean and sand, inducing a sense of vertigo and loneliness.
Battleground Point #20 by Richard Misrach
Richard Misrach, Chronologies
Through April 22 at Pace/MacGill
534 West 25th Street
(212) 759-7999
Through April 29 at Fraenkel Gallery
49 Geary St
San Francisco
(415) 981-2661
Stanley Greenberg's "Invisible City" was one of the first photo book I bought. (Actually, I received it as a gift.) The book collects his extensive project cataloging the hidden, frequently underground, world just outside of New Yorkers' everyday view. His latest work makes an abstract view of the constant construction that is going on all around us. (via BLDGBLOG)
Through May 20 at Candace Dwan Gallery
24 W 57th St, Suite 503
(212) 315-0065
Related: Annie Leibowitz was hired to document the construction of the New York Times Building around the corner from where I work. She seems an odd choice for the job, given her usual gig making celebrity portraits.
The Oregonian published an interview with Gregory Crewdson in connection with the new show of Crewdson's work (juxtaposed with Candida Hofer - a strange pairing in my opinion.) Many of the questions drive at Crewdson's affinity for the cinematic.
First and foremost, I consider myself a photographer in that I'm dealing with the central problem of creating a still image grounded in the real world in some way. And I feel very connected to the tradition of art photography -- the work of people like Lee Friedlander and Walker Evans. But that being said, photography has also easily absorbed the conventions of film, advertising and popular culture, too.
An interesting tic is how Crewdson naturally switches between "we" and "I" when talking about his working process. I'd need to analyze the interview more closely to determine whether there is a conscious pattern as to when he uses which pronoun. In any case, this plays into a pet thought of mine (not really a theory, just a thought) about the development of the "artist as project manager" brought about by the devaluing of individual skill coinciding with increased valuation of the artistic idea over physical artistic expression. Matthew Barney and Richard Serra would fall into this category as well. This is not to say that Crewdson is not skillful, it's just that his photography chops are not what are of primary value, its the overall conception of the piece. Execution is a matter for the production crew.
(via PORT)
